Smart Ways to Identify Valuable Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie, it may at the beginning seem to you as if choosing an affiliate partnership is no big deal. Ordinarily it is, but with the preponderance of effective affiliate marketing software and tools on the internet, it really isn’t a big deal. No doubt every merchant needs to be concerned about who they choose to represent or market their brand since most consumers see affiliates as real extensions of brands. In addition to that, carefully choosing the right partners can save merchants valuable time, stress and expended efforts in dealing with evasive, unserious and at times very difficult persons as affiliate partners. It is for these reasons many expert marketers believe that it is well worth the while to spare some extra time and efforts to source for and find the right affiliate partners.


 
Because of the intricate relationship between Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers, the partnership arrangement is as good as the weakest affiliate. Every merchant thus needs a good affiliate who is already doing very well as an influencer on the internet. Such affiliates must be persons who’ve already built up a body of engaged fans and followers and have worked hard to gain and maintain their trust over some time. These are the types of affiliates you can really benefit from if you’re picky about whom you choose. In a well-chosen affiliate partnership arrangement, it is the affiliate’s job to personally refer a merchant’s business to his/her followers. The reason adequate care must be taken to make sure he/she is the right partner for the job. It is the duty of the merchant to ensure that the affiliates he/she settles for have the right capacity to bring real value on board the partnership since it is the affiliates who must act as true representatives of the brand. As such, they must have the right capacity to promote and educate others about the product/service they are marketing.

Here are some tips which can assist you to determine which affiliates are really capable of adding value to your business.

Dutifully Track Affiliate Performance
 
The only credible way to truly measure affiliate performance value is by way of in-depth analytics using available tools online. It is easier to make decisions on whom to work with when you have the correct performance data at your disposal. That is irrespective of whether the affiliate is a new, up-and-coming affiliate or he/she already has considerable experience in affiliate marketing. The data you get from the analytics helps with the decision to determine which affiliate is bringing in real value to the business.

Evaluate the Quality of their Content 

In influencer marketing, content remains king. It is good content which attracts readers and retains followers. In affiliate marketing, the best affiliates to use are the ones who are steadily churning out high-quality, heavily trafficked content on their website, blog and social media profiles. The key is to always look out for original, well-written affiliate content featuring rich imagery and graphics. That is, the type of content which major search engines such as Google like to rank high. That is what guarantees the much needed traffic every marketer craves for.

Examine their Online Presence 

Expert marketers believe that it is best to partner only with influencers and publishers who have a positive and commanding online presence. That is, online presence which is devoid of controversy or damaging criticisms. You can easily gauge affiliate reputation from the comments and replies to their contents on social media from the general public. Since it is best to work with affiliates who have solid online presence, it helps to look out for affiliates who are actively engaged with their audience by way of quick responses to comments/concerns and the quality of the responses. 


 
Pay Attention to their Ethics Indicators 
 
An affiliate partner is a very important link in affiliate marketing strategy. That is why it is good to make sure you know how much information affiliates willingly reveal about themselves and their business without deliberate embellishments. It pays to research this information as affiliates’ ethics indicators. Such indicators are usually voluntary disclosures on an affiliate’s website or social media posts. The more affiliates reveal about themselves, the better for the indicator judgements. These indicators are good for affiliate partnership because they help build trust between the consumers and the promoters. Affiliate marketing works well through personal referral which relies heavily on trust.  Personal referrals can be grossly ineffective unless there is trust in the relationship.

Actively Search for Good Affiliates

The internet has lots of individuals and enterprise affiliates who are actively looking to partner with merchants. An active and deliberate search on the web can unveil many good and reputable affiliates looking to partner with merchants. Some deep searches can actually reveal highly informative stats indicating how active and successful some affiliates have been with previous campaigns/promotions.

Evaluate Affiliate Communications 

Effective online affiliate communication is indicative of how active such affiliates are. It is possible to know even from the very first couple of e-mails whether or not a person is going to be a good partner for your business or not. A lot depends on how quickly affiliates respond to inquiries and how much sense their responses make. Their response time and meaningful engagement are indicative of how serious they are with their marketing business. Tardy and unintelligent affiliate responses to inquiries are real indicators of poor affiliates.


 

How Affiliate Marketing Benefits Influencers

In affiliate marketing, merchants rely heavily on influencers as dependable affiliates to market their products. If you’ve had a bit of experience in Internet marketing, there is no doubt you already know why and how affiliate marketing works. Affiliate marketing derives its effectiveness by serving as an online referral program for merchant’s products/services. It thus serves as a very powerful marketing method where a trusted influencer helps to get a merchant’s product/service in front of the right buyers by way of influencer activities online.

Online, many affiliates know very well that affiliate marketing has lots of benefits for businesses and consumers. What many of such affiliates tend to overlook are the benefits in the affiliate relationship for themselves. Since it is¬ human beings who are influencers, many affiliates usually have lots of good reasons why they personally recommend items to their follower’s base online. They all know that all well-known affiliate marketing structures inevitably involve three parties, viz: the merchant/ business selling a product/service, the publisher/blogger/influencer promoting the product/service and the consumer. Without all three benefitting adequately from the marketing structure, it cannot yield good results. Influencers too benefit a great deal from this structure, the reason many take their influencer activities as real business.


 
Following are some of the most visible benefits influencers derive from affiliate marketing arrangements. 

Affiliate Marketing Helps to Grow Influencer Followers

The real strength of influencers always lies in their followers count. That is the income earning asset. Like every marketer knows full well, earning followers organically is always a very big challenge. For many influencers, to get in the big league, they do so many things to grow their followers count first before thinking of making money. With the advent of social media, many influencers now find it much easier to grow their followers count by promoting products /services on many social media channels. This way, they do increase their online popularity through valuable and well-tailored content they routinely post on these channels. When any of their posts manages to go viral on social media, their followers count benefits immensely as a result. What many readers want online are trust, authenticity and authoritativeness of content. Influencers who manage to give their followers these tend to earn more followers as a result. Social media is darn so popular that the ability of influencers to benefit from it is a given. All they need do is to always stand ready to give new ideas and content as well as brand new audiences which affiliate partnerships makes possible. Naturally, if a merchant whose products an influencer is promoting has a strong presence online and he opts to share the influencer’s content, that alone can help grow the influencer’s followers count in multiples. Affiliate partnerships with well-known brands are also a great way to boost influencers’ reputation and legitimacy. That ultimately leads to more followers for such influencers down the road.

Affiliate Marketing Enhances Unlimited Income for Influencers
 
In affiliate marketing, influencers tend to earn differently depending on their followers’ strength or the products they are promoting. There is practically no limit to what influencers can earn from their affiliate efforts. Earning income is probably number-one reason why most influencers choose to enter into affiliate contracts. On the average, many influencers earn some $5000-$50,000 per annum from affiliate income alone while some others by combining other online income streams earn some mind boggling sums. Many influencers with some 50 million or more followers earn big in affiliate marketing. At some point, the bulk of this income comes from passive income from contents they’ve posted in the past which had embedded ads and links.

Affiliate Marketing Allows Influencers to Work from Anywhere
 
Flexibility of work output stands today as an asset in an increasingly busy world. Building up influencer presence online can be quite tasking but with work flexibility, it can be taken on anywhere 24/7 provided there is internet access. That is work freedom which modern day workers really crave for. As an influencer, no matter where you are in the world, so long as you have a working internet connection, you can fully support and grow your affiliate marketing partnerships from there. If this coveted freedom allows you unfettered work to keep producing content such as photos, videos and blogs, you get to earn more clout and money as a result. Because of this work freedom, many influencers now use their own website/blog as a great way to combine their influencer marketing business with their affiliate income. They add passive income to that by working with merchants to embed banner ads/links into their websites and content. Inevitably, that translates to more earnings down the road.